The hacker and the ants

SIX

When I got home all was calm and dark. As I got out of the car, Studly called to me.

“Jerzy! I need electricity immediately.” His voice was faint.

I thought of Eddie Poe’s classic story, “The Cask of Amontillado,” where a man named Montresor lures his besotted enemy into a crypt, there to shackle and immure him.

“Wait till morning, Studly.”

“But I’ll lose all my memories, Jerzy. I haven’t downloaded to disk.”

“ For the love of God, Montresor,” I murmured mockingly. Studly had done more than enough damage already. The sooner his batteries died the better. Hopefully the memory wipe would erase the ant programs that had infected him. And if not, I’d better take him apart and crush his chips with pliers, as Roger had said. I went in the house, opened a beer, and sat down in front of the TV.

This TV hadn’t been turned on since the ants invaded Fibernet San Jose, so I figured that if I unplugged the cable I might be able to pick up clear broadcast television with the set’s rabbit ears. I gave it a try. I managed to watch about fifteen seconds worth of un-jammed network news, but then there was a little blip of static and- Hi, there! — the GoMotion ants were up and running on my TV. Now all the channels that I could pick up with my antenna were turned into crawling pixels, into people with ant heads, into random light shows-and the sound was chopped-up, crazy squawks.

What was happening, I figured, was that the GoMotion ants were in the broadcaster’s DTV compression chips, so that the compressed broadcast signals all included ant eggcases. That first blip of static had been an eggcase settling in on my DTV decompression chip. Aside from Roger Coolidge, I was probably the only person in the world who realized what was going on. All the local broadcasts now contained ant eggcases.

Presumably some of our local stories had gone out over satellite feed to network affiliates, so by now the ants had spread to those stations’ DTV chips. And those stations were in turn broadcasting ant eggcases to their viewers, as well as passing the ant infection on to other broadcast stations over satellite. Except for the few disadvantaged countries still on the old uncompressed analog TV standard, the whole of the global TV village would be full of ants by now.

Over the next hour, broadcaster after broadcaster gave up and went off-line-but it was way too late to stop the spread of the GoMotion ants.

Victory! VICTORY! Victory? The GoMotion ants had ruined television! But why, and what did it mean? I went to bed.

The next morning, Wednesday, I woke to the sound of a car pulling into my driveway, a car with a very loud engine. It was the stinking, roaring diesel Mercedes of Susan Poker. For the moment she didn’t get out of her car, but simply sat in there talking on her phone. Either she was waiting for a client, or she had nowhere better to pull over. Well, I could choose to ignore her. I had dead-bolted all the doors last night; there was no chance of Susan Poker using her key to come in. I decided to take a shower so that if she knocked, I honestly wouldn’t hear her.

But first I stepped onto the sun porch and checked once again that my computer was unplugged. Yes. And by now Studly would be in a coma. Maybe I wasn’t going to be implicated. But what about the Vos? Would they talk?

In the shower I wondered about the Vos. Surely the guy whose dog we’d killed would put the police onto the Vos. But you were always reading in the paper how Vietnamese people never talk to the cops. If you’re Vietnamese, even if some neighborhood Vietnamese hooligans come in and take your savings at knifepoint, you don’t talk to the authorities. If you trusted the authorities, you would have put the money in a bank instead of keeping it under your mattress in the first place. No, with any luck, the Vos would keep mum, and GoMotion would stonewall. So what would the cops have to go on?

I dried myself, and put on my shorts, sandals, argyle socks, and a favorite green shirt with cubic Mandelbrot sets. As I shaved, my calming reveries were interrupted by a loud pounding on the front door.

“Open up! Police!”

Oh well!

There was a black-and-white cop car parked on Tangle Way, and Susan Poker’s Mercedes was still in the driveway behind my Animata. She was standing by her car watching the police, Susan Poker with her red suit, bleached hair, and plastic-shiny makeup- she’d called the cops on me! I felt such strong hatred toward her that it made me weak in the knees.

“Open up!” repeated the policeman at my door.

I opened. The cop was an exceedingly tall and heavy young white guy with a thick mustache. His partner, who was smaller and Hispanic, hung back and kept his hand near his gun.

“Are you Jerzy Rugby?” asked the tall cop.

“Yes.”

“Sir, we have a search warrant and a warrant for your arrest.” He showed me some pieces of paper. One of the things they were authorized to look for was a “mobile robot.” They were authorized to search my house, my car and, if need be, my person and my body cavities.

“Sir, we are required to handcuff you. Please place your arms behind your back.”

Before I knew it, I was shackled in the grilled-off back of a police car with no handles on the inside of the door. It was surprisingly dirty back there, with empty coffee cups, Jack In The Box wrappers, and Mr. Donut boxes. Susan Poker walked past me and followed the police into my house. “I saw the robot right in here yesterday,” she called to them.

Yes, the East San Jose cops had failed to get my license plate number, the Vos were mute, and GoMotion was stonewalling, but Susan Poker-Susan Poker remembered having seen a robot shaped like a garbage can on wheels at my house, and she remembered how much attitude I’d given her. When she read the morning papers (none of the usual televised “Good Morning Amerikkka” fare today, what with all the digital TV channels ant-broken!), Susan Poker put two and two together, informed the police, and headed for my house to see the bust come down. At least these were the hypotheses that I immediately framed.

After a few minutes the policemen reappeared, lugging the main box of my computer. They set it down on the front porch.

“Here are his car keys,” said Susan Poker, emerging from the house. “I found them on his dresser.”

“Thank you, ma’am. But we’re going to have to ask you to stay out of the way.”

She glanced gloatingly at me and got back in her Mercedes to watch from there. After a few moments I saw her pick up her car phone.

Meanwhile the cops opened the trunk of my Animata. There lay silent Studly. The big cop got back in his car; he sat down on the seat in front of me and called the station. He had a speakerphone with a flip-up video screen in the dash.

“We have Jerzy Rugby and the mobile robot in custody. There’s also a box of backup CDs. Are you going to send a van to pick up the machinery? Uh-huh. So San Jose will. Yes. I’ll bring him in and leave Sergeant Roca here to watch the machinery. Ten-four.”

The big cop took me down to the Los Perros pplice station, which was quite near, just down at the foot of Polvo Para Hornear hill. He tucked my keys into my pants pocket before he left. A man at the station read me my rights and put me in an unfurnished, windowless basement room. Light came through a thick square of wire-mesh glass in the cell’s heavy wooden door. I sat on the low bench that was bolted to the wall across from the door. Except for me and the bench, the only other thing in the room was an ant crawling around on my sandaled foot. She was from the empty Mr. Donut box in the cop car, I imagined, or perhaps from my house or my yard. I crossed my leg to get a better look at her. When she reached the top of my argyle sock, she reached forward with her antennae and with her front pair of legs to feel of my leg hair and skin. No good, she decided, and headed back down my sock toward my sandal. Clever ants.

Yesterday Ida had said, “The Lord hates Daddy’s ants,” but I still thought the GoMotion ants were good. It was good to have put a stop to television, if only for a few days. If the truth be told, I’d been hoping all along that it would come to this-I mean, quite objectively, why else would I have been helping Roger evolve artificial life for DTV chips? I hoped it wouldn’t be as obvious to the courts as it was to me.

Of course it had been Roger Coolidge who’d made the initial decision to farm our ants on digital television compression and decompression chips. He’d done that before I’d even come to GoMotion. In a legendary feat of superhacking, Roger had built the ant lab while he’d been writing the code for ROBOT. LIB.

Roger said he’d picked DTV chips as his culture medium because they were cheap and they had a clean architecture for generating graphics. But I’d often thought about the possibility of the ants escaping into the world at large, and whenever he’d asked my opinion about design decisions, I’d always tilted toward the path that would make the ants more capable of spreading from chip to chip. Sometimes I had even e-mailed things to Roger about wanting to ruin digital TV, and he’d always responded in a friendly, if somewhat neutral, way. If any of that e-mail came out in the trials, I wasn’t going to stand a chance.

I sat there numb with worry for about half an hour, and then two San Jose cops showed up to take me downtown. The San Jose police station was a six-story beige building on First Street near Route 880. The press had gotten wind of my arrest, and there was a crowd of reporters outside the police station. They snapped pictures of me and yelled questions: “Can you make a statement?” “Why did you do it?” “When will television be restored to normal?” “What are your demands?”

I had a big San Jose cop on either side of me, and they dragged me past the reporters fast. Inside the building they brought me to a fourth-floor office with a man in a suit. All this time I was still wearing plastic handcuffs. I waited standing between the cops while the man finished talking on the phone.

“Uh-huh. He just got here. Five-eleven, 180 pounds, long brown hair, wire and horn-rim glasses, wearing short pants, argyle socks, Birkenstock sandals, and a colorful sport shirt? Check. Thank you, Mr. Pear. I’ll be expecting the fax. And please let us know if you have to leave town; we may need for you to make a deposition in person before the indictment.” He hung up and looked at me and the cops.

“Jerzy Rugby. I’m Captain Austin of the computer crime squad. You can uncuff him, officers. Thank you. Yes, you can go, though I’d like for one of you to wait outside. We won’t be too long. Thank you. Now then, Mr. Rugby, I’ve just been in contact with your former manager at GoMotion Inc., a Mr. Jeffrey Pear?”

“What is it that I’m charged with?”

“You have been read your rights, yes? Fine. We may still reformulate the charges. That’s one of the issues that we need to talk about before the D.A. takes this to the grand jury this afternoon. Your warrant of record is for criminal trespass, computer intrusion, and extreme cruelty to animals. Three state felony charges, with a possible maximum total sentence of fifteen years. And the feds want a crack at you, too. The federal prosecutor is getting a whole bouquet of different charges ready. How does treason sound? I have it on the best authority that the president of the United States wants your butt in jail for life. His exact words. The president likes TV. Jerzy, do you realize that under federal law treason is a capital crime?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I want to call a lawyer.”

“Certainly. You will be given the opportunity to call a lawyer. But first I’d like to have just a little background while I finish booking you. Jeffrey Pear says you were fired from GoMotion for breaking the security of-” Captain Austin glanced at the notepad on his desk, “-an artificial life experiment modeled on an ant colony. He further said that you had so contaminated your computer and a prototype GoMotion robot that these hardware items were given to you as part of your written severance agreement.”

“That’s not what happened at all. And I have not received any written severance agreement.”

“Fine. I’m very eager to hear your story. But just let me fill you in a bit more on our current picture of things. A man and a robot answering to the description of you and-is it Studly?”

“That is the name of my robot, yes.”

“A man and a robot resembling you and Studly were reported to have been in an altercation with a Jose Ruiz of 5782 White Road yesterday afternoon. The man’s dog was killed, and the Fibernet cable to his house was cut. Shortly after the cable was cut, a computer virus infected all of the digital compression hardware at Fibernet San Jose and bounced out to the chips of all the active TV sets in San Jose. Worse than that, the virus worked its way upstream from Fibernet San Jose into the local TV station studios and got into their DTV compression chips as well. Shortly after that, the virus went out with San Jose news feeds over the satellite links and infested the studios of every digital TV station and cable service in the world. For the moment there’s damn near no television. Do you have a reaction to that?“

I knew better than to reveal my true feelings of triumph and awe. “I suppose that’s very inconvenient for many people. But it’s certainly not my fault.”

“Do you admit that you were at 5782 White Road yesterday?”

“I don’t admit anything.”

“Jerzy, I’d like to make it easy for you. You seem like an intelligent man. You can work with me or you can work against me. And if you work against me you’re going to spend a long time in jail. You might even get the death penalty. You don’t want to die in jail, do you, Jerzy?” I shook my head and Captain Austin smiled. “So help me out a little. I’m trying to understand what happened. Jeffrey Pear says it’s all your fault, but maybe he’s not giving me the straight story. What happened at GoMotion? Why were you fired? Pear says it was simply a matter of incompetence.” Captain Austin paused and looked at his pad again. “Pear says, ‘Jerzy Rugby doesn’t know a function pointer from a linked list.’ He says you ripped off some experimental virus-like software and deliberately used it to blank out television so as to give GoMotion a black eye. Would you call that an accurate account?”

“Hell no!” I flared. “What Pear says is total bullshit. Look-if you really want to know about the GoMotion ants, ask Roger Coolidge. I bet Pear didn’t mention him to you. Roger Coolidge is the founder of GoMotion. He left for Switzerland Monday night. Roger built the GoMotion ants before I even started working there. I used to talk to him about his design, but he called the shots. The ants were Roger’s experiment with artificial life. They were meant to be like living, self-improving pieces of DTV display code. Roger Coolidge is the one who set the ants loose. He e-mailed an eggcase of them to my deck, took off for Switzerland, and then had Jeff Pear fire me. It’s a total setup. I’m just a patsy.“

“That’s very helpful, Jerzy. Why don’t I call in a stenographer to take down your story. It would be a good thing to get your side on record.”

The captain’s voice had taken on a soothing, caressing tone. The captain was my friend. It would be so great to sit here and tell him my side of the story without worrying about silly legalistic things like my Miranda rights… at least maybe that’s what I was supposed to think. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. I’d pleaded guilty to pot possession for a two hundred dollar fine once in my twenties, and it had cost me thousands and thousands of dollars in job rejections and increased insurance premiums over many many years. No, the police are not your friends.

“I want to talk to a lawyer.” I crossed my arms and leaned back in my chair.

“Go ahead.” He pushed his phone across his desk. “You can make one call. One seven-digit number. No phone phreaking.”

As if being a serious hacker were the same as being a cryp all hot to dial into the weapons division of Livermore Labs, or an anarchist bent on bringing down the phone system. Though, heh, in the government’s eyes I was a terrorist who’d done something even worse. I’d blanked out digital TV: treason?

I took the phone and, come to think of it, I didn’t actually know any lawyers in California. Carol had said she was going to talk to a lawyer today about child support payments, but she hadn’t told me his or her name, not that I’d want to talk to Carol’s lawyer. Instead of calling a lawyer, I should call someone who could really help me. Not GoMotion, certainly, but-why not West West? No doubt they were ecstatic over the bad publicity the ants were bringing to GoMotion. I pulled Ben Brie’s business card out of my wallet and dialed his number.

“Ben Brie speaking.”

“Ben, it’s Jerzy Rugby. Something’s come up. I’ve been arrested.”

“Does that mean you’ll be late to work?” He chuckled softly. “Are you in for something juicy?” His sarcastic drawl was wonderful to hear.

“It’s the television thing. The GoMotion ants. They’re trying to pin it on me.”

“Very interesting.” He stretched the words out as he thought things over. “You’re calling because you need a lawyer?”

“Right. I figured you guys must know a lot of lawyers.”

“We do. Hmmm. I’ll talk to Otto Gyorgyi, and if he approves, which I’m sure he will, we’ll send someone over. Where are you?”

“The San Jose police station on First Street.”

“Okay, Jerzy. Keep your mouth shut and wait for the lawyer. West West will have you out on bail before you know it.”

“Thanks, Ben.”

“Hey, it’s a standard employee benefit!”

I was free on bail by suppertime. The reporters outside were rabid; they were personally affronted by the blankout of TV. If this kept up, many of them would be out of a job. Till now, I’d been nursing a deep-seated feeling that the mass of people would be as glad as I was to have TV gone. But seeing the reporters’ anger, I realized I might be wrong.

The West West lawyer-a tall, soft curly-haired guy called Stu Koblenz-gave me a ride back to Los Perros in his car. Vans and cars with reporters followed us down the freeway. When we got to my house, there were so many newspeople standing there that I was scared to get out. I had my keys, and my car was still there in the driveway, but I didn’t see any way to get out without being totally mobbed.

“Just drive on past and drop me down in Los Perros, Stu. I’ll come back here on foot later.”

“Okay.”

As we motored past my home, I noticed a piece of paper tacked to the front door. An eviction notice? A sheriffs sequestration? Tarn tvat asi, as the mantra used to go: And this too. Back in my thirties, before I filled my heart with computer code, I had a few periods of total spiritual enlightenment. All is One, and each event is a gem facet of the One, even a Pig scrawl on your front door. Enlightenment is a big help in crisis times, though the rest of the time there’s still the unyielding question of what to do with the rest of your life.

Down in Los Perros, I directed Stu to drive briskly around the block and whip into an alley, leaving our tail momentarily out of sight. I hopped out, ran into the back door of Mountain Pizza, and stepped out of the front.

There on the sidewalk was a rack of evening newspapers. My picture was on the front page with the headlines:

HACKER ARRESTED

Television Blankout To Continue

GOMOTION DENIES RESPONSIBILITY

I bought a copy and folded it in half. Down the block was a clothes store. I went in and bought a 49ers sweatshirt. To complete my disguise I bought one of those moronic billed caps with a plastic strap in back-the kind of hat that people who watch television wear.

I went around the corner to an Irish bar called D.T. Finnegan’s, a publike space with green carpets, dark wood wainscoting, and antique stained glass windows. The bartender there knew me, but I sat at a table with my back to him and with my billed cap pulled down so he wouldn’t notice me. His name was Tommy. At this very moment he was, in fact, discussing my case with the men at the bar.

“A nice guy,” he was telling them. The three TV screens over the bar were blank. I found the silence wonderful, but the men did not. They were sullen and bewildered. There was some kind of sports event they wanted to be watching. “He comes in here afternoons when he gets tired of hacking,” Tommy was saying. “He’s kind of an old hippie.”

“They ought to castrate him,” someone opined.

“People will go nuts with no TV,” another one put in. “I can’t face going home tonight. What the hell am I going to do all evening?”

The waitress came to me and I ordered a beer and a barbecued pork sandwich. I was very hungry. While I waited for the food, I studied the newspaper. There was no TV working anywhere on the planet save for the few remaining analog backwaters-Borneo, Peru, New Guinea, Zaire, Micronesia. The “GoMotion ant virus” was believed to have been released by Jerzy Rugby, a disaffected programmer recently fired by GoMotion. Nancy Day, the president of GoMotion, promised that a “GoMotion ant lion” would soon be available to set things right. I guessed that Nancy Day, whom I’d never met, was fronting for Roger. There was a big sidebar article with some Q amp;A on the situation.

Q: What is GoMotion Inc.?

A: GoMotion Inc. of Santa Clara is a manufacturer of custom software kits for assembling intelligent machinery. They are best-known for the Iron Camel dune buggy, which has sold 1.5 million units worldwide. Their next product is to be a line of build-it-yourself home robot kits called the GoMotion Veep.

Q: Why were the GoMotion ants developed?

A: The GoMotion ants are an example of artificial life, which refers to computer programs that change and evolve on their own. GoMotion says the ant programs were designed for research use only. For practical and cost-cutting reasons, the ants were evolved to live on the inexpensive, readily available chips that are found in DTV equipment.

Q: How did the ants spread?

A: A rogue prototype Veep robot used a laser-scanner to feed the programs into Fibernet San Jose. The entry point for the infection was a cut Fibernet cable on White Road in San Jose.

Q: Who is to blame?

A: The robot, who is called Studly, was in the possession of Jerzy Rugby, a programmer who was recently fired by GoMotion Inc. Rugby has now been indicted by a California state grand jury on charges of criminal trespass, computer intrusion, and extreme cruelty to animals. In addition, a federal grand jury is preparing to indict him on charges of sabotage of a public utility, contamination of cable services, destruction of national defense utilities, and treason. Rugby is currently free on $3 million bail. The bail was posted by attorney Stuart Koblenz, representing Seven Lucky Overseas.

Q: What is Seven Lucky Overseas?

A: Seven Lucky Overseas is a Taiwanese-based company that has a history of competing for the same markets as GoMotion Inc. Their first U.S. daughter company, GoWheels Inc., was successfully sued by GoMotion Inc. for copyright infringement. Their most infamous subsidiary company was Meta Meta, which produced a robot called the Choreboy. In a grotesque holiday mishap, a Choreboy killed a baby by sticking a meat thermometer into the child’s heart and roasting it in place of a Thanksgiving turkey. Meta Meta went into Chapter 11 and reorganized as West West, which is slated to release a robot called the Adze. The Adze robot will be comparable to the GoMotion Veep.

Q: How soon will TV broadcasts resume?

A: GoMotion officials have promised that a free “GoMotion ant lion” program will be available from them within 48 hours. Like the ants, the ant lion program will be a self-replicating computer virus. According to GoMotion, however, the ant lion will be a benevolent virus that takes up residence on DTV chips and devotes its energy solely to finding and eradicating all GoMotion ants which may arrive. If the FCC agrees to the release of the GoMotion ant lions, and if the ant lions are indeed successful, then normal digital broadcasting could resume in a matter of days.

Q: What can I do in the meantime?

A: The ant virus affects high-definition, compressed, digital, cable, or satellite-transmitted TV. If you have an older TV set-the kind with rabbit ears and a manual channel selector knob-then you will be able to receive analog TV signals from a variety of local ATV, or amateur TV, channels that transmit in this form. See the TV amp; Entertainment section for information about the best of ATV and about how to retrofit your set.

Q: What about rental movies?

A: CDs, S-cubes, and downloadable video all use the same digital compression technologies as broadcast DTV and are thus subject to the same interference from the GoMotion ante.

Q: Are other communications media in danger?

A: There have been no reports of interference with radio or with voice telephone, which are still purely analog forms of communication. There have been numerous sightings of GoMotion ants on the digital cyberspace Net, although as yet no data damages have been reported. Expunging the GoMotion ant virus from cyberspace could prove more difficult than removing it from TV. The reason is that there is a much greater diversity of “ecological niches” for artificial life-forms to inhabit in cyberspace.

Q: Is this just the first wave of a new generation of computer viruses?

A: If the GoMotion ants are able to permanently establish themselves in cyberspace, they could undergo a process like evolution and become ever more destructive and harder to kill. This would be analogous to the way in which each winter’s flu viruses are immune to the vaccines of the year before. Conceivably the cyberspace-based ants could periodically reinfect television. The most pessimistic prediction is that DTV-busting viruses are here to stay, and that digital television is a thing of the past.

While I was reading, the food and beer had come, and I’d been consuming them. Now I was done eating, and I’d paid the waitress off. I wasn’t sure what to do next.

“Jerzy!”

I looked up. It was Gretchen Bell, standing over me and smiling. She was wearing a short pleated plaid skirt with a pale yellow sweater. She looked languidly lively. “I was just talking about you! Everyone in my office has been asking me what you’re like!”

Tommy the bartender heard Gretchen saying my name, and now he hailed me, too. “Jerzy Rugby! The man who killed television!” A hubbub of voices ensued.

“Can I come over to your house, Gretchen?” I asked quickly.

“My apartment? I thought you said you were going to take me to the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco.” She laughed softly, keeping me hanging. “Well, let’s see. I have to go to Safeway, and I have to pick up some dry-cleaning. But after that, okay.” She gave me a good smile. She had the hots for me as much as I did for her. And now I was famous. “Do you know where I live?”

Someone tapped my shoulder, the same man who’d said I should be castrated. I kept my back to him and leaned toward Gretchen.

“I’m going to need a ride out of here. Like right now?”

“All right.”

“Are you some kind of goddamn terrorist?” demanded the castration advocate.

“I’m a software engineer,” I said as I turned. “What happened was an industrial accident.” I stepped around him and called a good-bye to the bartender. “Gotta go, Tommy! Sorry I can’t discuss the case!” There were plenty of other people who wanted to talk to me, but a minute later we were driving off in Gretchen’s car, a sputtering ten-year-old yellow Porsche.

“I bought this from an old boyfriend for two thousand dollars,” Gretchen told me. “Not bad, hey?”

“You must have a lot of boyfriends,” I essayed. I still knew almost nothing about Gretchen. “What kind of office do you work in?”

“Didn’t I tell you? I’m a mortgage insurance broker and I work part-time at Welsh amp; Tayke. With Susan Poker?”

“Susan Poker! She’s my worst enemy! She’s the one who turned me in! Did you talk to her about me?”

“Sure, Jerzy. I tell all my friends the exact intimate sensual details about every relationship I ever have.” Gretchen tossed her bell of long straight hair and glanced over to smile at me. “ Not. Well, okay, yesterday I may have told Susan that you and I were intimate. She was fascinated. I think she has a thing for you.”

“Did you tell her about the ants in my computer?”

“What is this, a quiz show?” Gretchen swung into the Safeway parking lot. “Do you have any money yet?”

“Here.” I handed her a twenty. “I’ll wait in the car.”

“Do you like anything special for breakfast?” The assumption behind the question made my heart beat faster.

“Low-fat milk. English muffins. Maybe get some wine or beer for tonight.”

“Can I have two more twenties?” Her blue eyes gazed at me calmly.

“Jesus, Gretchen.” I handed her the bills.

She started across the lot, tall and willowy, with her skirt swaying beautifully, and then she turned and walked partway back to me. “What about condoms?” she called.

The boldness of the question made my throat contract with lust, and my voice came out thin and reedy. “I don’t have any with me.”

“Well you better get some at the Walgreen’s over there.”

“Yes.” It was hard to imagine that this was the same Safeway parking lot where I had so often shopped with Carol. Walking across the lot, I half-expected Carol to pop up and ask me what I was doing.

As soon as Gretchen and I were done with our shopping, we went to her apartment and fucked. It was just as good as it had been on Monday; it was so good it made me change the way I think.

During my twenty-three years with Carol, I’d always thought-in some deep, unreasoning way-that there was something unique about Carol herself that made sex possible. I’d always acted on the assumption that Carol was the one physiologically compatible organism with whom the being Jerzy Rugby could successfully mate.

Yet now, with Gretchen, I realized-way down in my soul-that it was indeed possible to have sex with people besides Carol. Monday I’d been too surprised for it to sink in. But, yes, sex with Gretchen was just as great as with Carol. For the first time since Carol had left me, I realized that perhaps I could continue life without her. I still missed Carol’s personality-the tender music of her voice (when she was in a good mood), and the rich play of her conversation (when she was speaking to me)-but now I realized that I did not need to miss Carol’s body. How liberating; how sad.

Gretchen and I fell asleep in each other’s arms. Sometime in the middle of the night the phone rang. Gretchen picked it up.

“Hi. Umm-hmmm. Scrumptious. No, no. For sure! Bye.”

Gretchen set down the phone and embraced me. We kissed and went back to sleep.

In the morning I got up and took a piss. Regally nude, I wandered into the kitchen for some food. I hadn’t even thought yet to start worrying about my legal troubles. Just then someone tapped softly on the door. I harkened, and the tap came again, tinny on the hollow metal of the apartment door.

“Jerzy, can you get it?” croaked sleepy Gretchen If from the bedroom.

“Who is it?” I asked, hurrying back in there to pull on my khaki shorts.

If “Oh, it’s one of my friends. A woman.” Gretchen snuggled her head deep into her pillow and closed her eyes. ”You talk to her. I’ll get up in a second.“

The soft tap-tapping had a bland implacability that set my nerves on edge. I found my glasses right away, but it was taking me forever to find my watch and wallet. Tappity-tap. The tapping was rushing me, the tapping was telling me what to do, the tapping was making me feel like a stupid doomed animal that tries to flee an oncoming locomotive by running straight down the track.

“I don’t want to answer the door,” I hissed to Gretchen as I pulled on my argyles and buckled my sandals. “And how can you be sure it’s your friend? Who knows I’m here? Who called you on the phone last night?”

“Go answer the door.”

So like an idiot I did. And guess what? It was Susan Poker.

“Mr. Rugby,” said she, smiling in a new, more personal, though still not very friendly, way. Her sharp curious eyes roved rapidly over me. “We meet again!”

“Oh God. I don’t believe this. Susan Poker.” I looked past her to see who she’d brought in tow-but for now nobody was visible. She made as if to walk into the apartment but I held the door half-closed so as to block her way.

Rage was flaring up in me; I had to struggle to stay calm. Don’t use curse words, Jerzy. Don’t be violent. One wrong move and Susan Poker would have the cops, on me like stink on shit. I put my head through some major changes and choked out a civil sentence.

“What is your business here?”

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Rugby, I was hoping to discuss real estate with you.” She was wearing a green silk suit with a yellow scoopneck blouse. Her shoes matched her suit. I was shirtless. “Gretchen,” called Susan Poker, using her voice to reach past me. “Tell your gentleman friend it’s safe to let me in!”

I sighed and stepped aside. Susan Poker closed the door behind her and Gretchen appeared from the bedroom, sexy and soft-eyed, dressed in a pale blue bed jacket over a silky, creamy button-up nightie.

“Well, Gretchen,” said Susan Poker. “Is Jerzy any good?”

By way of answer, Gretchen gave a whoop of laughter and a wild toss of her head.

“That’s a yes,” I stated, and Gretchen didn’t contradict me.

“Shall I make coffee?” suggested Susan Poker. “I know where everything is.”

“Thanks,” said Gretchen. “I want to take my shower.” She waggled her fingers and closed her bedroom door with a last injunction that we “Be nice to each other!”

“Was it you who called Gretchen last night?” I asked Susan Poker.

“I wanted to be sure she was safe. We single gals have to look out for each other. But I’m here this morning because I want to talk to you.”

“About real estate? Why don’t we talk about how you turned me in?”

“Oh, you think I called the police? No, no. I just heard them on my scanner. Since I have an interest in your dwelling-and in you-I got there as fast as I could.”

“Why would a Realtor have a police scanner?”

“All the agencies have one. We need to know right away when a property is about to go on the market.”

“Like when the owner dies?”

“It’s dog eat dog, Jerzy. But, no, I didn’t turn you in. Until I heard the call it hadn’t occurred to me that it was you who launched the GoMotion ants. That was over on the east side. Terrible property values there.” She gazed at me pleasantly, her face as blank and smooth as a cyberspace mannequin’s. There was no way to tell if she was lying. This branch of the conversation had reached a dead end.

“So what was the real estate deal you wanted to talk to me about? You’re getting me evicted, right?”

“You’re so suspicious, Mr. Rugby! No, the deal is that I think you should acquire the Nutt property.”

“I don’t have a million dollars.”

“You posted three million in bail, didn’t you?”

“My new employer posted it for me.”

“Just tell them to buy you the house.” She leaned forward and laid her hand on my forearm. “Did you know that property is as good as cash for a bond? I double-checked the legalities yesterday afternoon. Your employer could convert part of the bond money into a deed on the house and simply post the deed. Your trial and appeals could drag on for a year or more, and in that time, the Nutt property would probably appreciate by twenty percent. As long as that million dollars just sits there as bond, it isn’t drawing any interest whatsoever. If I work like mad, I can put the whole deal through in thirty days!”

“Well…”

“Just give me the name of the person you called to get your bail.”

“I… ” Again I felt like a rabbit running from a locomotive. “I’ll think about it. But I’m not sure I want that house, and I don’t want to turn around and ask my new boss for another big favor right off the bat.”

“What did you say his name was? He’s at Seven Lucky Overseas?” She was watching me closely, trying to read my face.

“Will you get off my case!” My voice was rising.

“Now, now!” It was Gretchen, dressed in red stirrup pants and a black blouse.

“How did this leech find out I’m here, Gretchen? I still can’t believe you’re friends with her!”

“Gretchen and I were looking out the front window of Welsh amp; Tayke yesterday,” said Susan Poker, looking pleased that I was beginning to lose my cool. “We were just sitting there leeching around. I spotted you walking by, and Gretchen took off after you. She said if she didn’t come back it meant she’d picked you up again! I made her promise that if she did, she’d let me come for breakfast.” She gestured cheerfully with her coffee cup. “Speaking of breakfast, Gretchen, can we have some toast?”

I felt like a moth being wrapped in spider silk: snared, envenomed, paralyzed, cocooned, and slowly sucked dry-or made the living host of eyeless larvae. I tried to struggle, to shake the web. “Have either of you heard of Hex DEF6?” I demanded. “Out with it!”

“Hex deaf sex?” giggled Susan Poker-a bit too glibly?

“What are you talking about, Jerzy?” asked Gretchen, bringing the toast.

“Hex DEF6 is the name of a simmie I talked to in cyberspace. It was Monday, the same day the ants scared you, Gretchen. That night I put the goggles back on and I flew out of the ant cloud you’d been in. One of the ants got big and it carried me back to the ants’ cyberspace nest. Inside the nest was this simmie that looked like Death and said his name was Hex DEF6. There was a Susan Poker simmie in there too. Were you in it Susan?”

“Me in cyberspace?” She laughed and shook her head. “I’m computer illiterate. Are you sure you saw a simmie of me?”

“Well, it might have just been there to scare me,” I allowed. “The whole scene was pretty weird. Instead of a mouth, Hex DEF6 had a metal zipper with a padlock on it.”

“Could he talk?” asked Gretchen.

“Yes. He said that he’d hurt me and my children if I didn’t go work for-” I stopped myself from saying more.

“For Seven Lucky Overseas,” finished Susan Poker.

“That’s not the name they’re using!” I exclaimed happily, and bit into my toast. Once you got used to Susan Poker she was sort of amusing. She was so totally out front about her nosiness and pushiness. A born Realtor.

“Have you considered selling your story to the press?” asked Susan Poker. “You could go on ‘Sixty Minutes.’”

“There’s nothing but amateur TV anymore,” reminded Gretchen.

“Well, when the networks come back,” said Susan Poker, sipping her coffee. “You need an agent, Mr. Rugby. I could do it for fifteen percent. I’ve got more connections than you realize.”

Done with eating, I shook my head and stood up.

“Good-bye, ladies. It was fun, Gretchen. I’ll call.”

“How will you get to work?” demanded Susan Poker. “Can I give you a ride?”

“And where will you stay tonight?” asked Gretchen. “Are you going to come back here?”

“ I’ll call. I am not going to discuss every goddamn detail of my life in front of Susan Poker.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Rugby,” said Susan Poker.

Gretchen followed me into the hall and gave me a giggling kiss. This was all pretty funny, I guess. Love makes everything funny. Love? Yes, I loved Gretchen, though that didn’t mean much. Love is, after all, an elastic concept; like many men, I fall in love several times every day. So why not say it.

“I love you, Gretchen.”

“I like that in a man.” She pursed her lips and planted a kiss on me, just like Carol used to do. “Have a nice day. And come back. You don’t really have to take me to the Mark Hopkins.”

“Should I come back tonight?”

For the first time this morning, Gretchen looked evasive. “Well, tonight I have a date. But if you’re desperate, I’ll break it. You’re scared to go back to your own house, huh?”

“I’m going to get my car, but I’m not going to stay there.”

“Well…” While Gretchen hesitated, Susan Poker briefly popped her head out of Gretchen’s door for a peek at what was taking us so long. If the loathsome Susan Poker was in this space, why was I so intent on trying to stay here? For more sex with Gretchen? But I’d just finished realizing that sex could happen with lots of different women, right?

“Gretchen, enjoy your date and don’t worry about where I stay. I’ve got it together.” I tapped the top of my head to mime the togetherness that I hoped would soon arrive. “I’ll call tomorrow. And don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about the Mark Hopkins.”

Key in hand, I made my way up Tangle Way. The notice was still on my front door, but I didn’t dare go close enough to read it. There were a half-dozen reporters sitting in their cars. My driveway was clear. Moving quickly, I got in my Animata and drove off, shaking the pursuit cars on the freeway to West West.